The Domino Effect: How Serious Is The Shuttle Delay and What Harm Can It Cause? By James Oberg t wasn’t officially a “grounding,” but two days after a glorious or “three months,” and rarely included any dates within this calendar “return to flight” on July 26, officials said NASA’s space shuttle year. Optimists hope that a new mission could be mounted early in I fleet would not fly again until the vehicle’s persistent foam-shed- 2006, although the middle of the year seemed more likely to them. ding faults were fixed. At least two significant fragments of insulation That’s a delay of 10 to 12 months or perhaps more. had torn off during launch, and a smaller piece had veered so close to Investigators will be using this time to dissect another exist- the right wing that it might well have scraped it. ing external tank (per- Within the shuttle program, space workers were generally haps the one originally resigned to redouble their efforts to complete the safety upgrades slated for STS-114) to that would reduce flight hazards to a tolerable level. But other emo- examine the true state tions were mixed in to varying degrees. There was a lot of startled of the bonds holding gloom, for some to the extent of dusting off professional résumés. insulating foam onto the There was some helpless anger—most of them had done their jobs metal hull. Few perfectly, but some of their teammates had apparently let the home observers, even dedicat- team down. (There was even some gung-ho flamboyance: claims that ed space buffs, realize all it would take was glue and baling wire to get the spaceship cleared that most of the insula- to fly again.) tion on the tanks that At press conferences, shuttle program manager Bill were shipped to Florida Parsons was repeatedly interrogated about the possible time frame of were installed in the the predicted delays. He refused (properly) to make any quantitative year prior to the reply, but at one point remarked that the delay “might be one month, Columbia disaster, and it might be three months,” but didn’t speculate anything longer than do not reflect any that. “redesigned tank” at all. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin spoke to newsmen four Once a diagno- days into Discovery’s mission and refused to take either the sis is reached, a variety September of November launch windows off the table. But at another of treatments must be press event that same day, Richard Covey, co-leader of the team that developed and tested. assessed NASA’s compliance with the recommendations of the Sample applications will Columbia Accident Investigation Board, said he saw the need for more be made on test-beds, fundamental research into “the phenomenon and the physics” of foam which will be subjected lost in order to better understand the theoretical basis of the shedding to rigorous environmen- Return to Fright: Gaps in problem. Such a research program, perhaps involving complex wind tal conditions, before the insulation foam on tunnel and aircraft flight tests, could take a significant time. However, being dissected again. Discovery’s external tank Covey added he did not think it would be anything like the gap between Whichever process is show foam loss from the Columbia and the recent RTF. ultimately selected—STS- tank’s Protuberance Air Load Sadly, past delays in solving engineering problems that had 114’s tank has different (PAL) Ramp. A foam impact led grounded the fleet turned out to be significantly longer than initially areas where failures to the destruction of the expected. The first flight on April 12, 1981, was more than two years indicate the need for Columbia shuttle during re- late. Even after Challenger was lost in January 1986, and then new but different techni- entry on February 1, 2003. Columbia in February 2003, shuttle managers initially believed they cal solutions—must then Image Credit: NASA would be flying again within four months. Yet both times, it took about be implemented in a two and a half years to get off the ground again. process under strict There was an additional scheduling flaw that may cast light control. Only then will a on today’s problem. In both cases, during the time the fleet was flight-ready external tank be available for shipment to Florida in prepa- grounded, managers kept believing—and acting on—the idea that they ration for a new shuttle launch. would resume operations within six to eight months. This delusion led There’s probably no “pixie dust” solution that will make the them to reject many serious repair and upgrade proposals that would tanks currently in Florida suddenly acceptable through piecemeal local have been very effective but would have needed more than 12 months surgery. Even transportation efforts alone will take months. Any sug- to implement. Convinced there wasn’t enough time remaining before gestion to simply “jury rig” existing foamed tanks will be greeted with the next launch, management regularly turned down such recommen- the extreme skepticism it deserves. dations. But the notion that the next shuttle mission, STS-121 by Armed with 60/60 hindsight, and with the experience of Atlantis, will not occur in this calendar year is sending ripples through- seeing how long the last effort took to redesign and re-verify the shut- out the International Space Station (ISS) program, Washington- tle’s fuel tank, I’ve collected the “best guesses” from space program Moscow diplomacy circles and the science community as the future of veterans. The range of their estimates doesn’t suggest “one month” the faltering Hubble Space Telescope becomes ever more in doubt. 16 A flawless Discovery mission was always expected to be crit- purely cash-and-carry basis. But NASA is forbidden by law to buy any ical for the ISS. Spare parts and crew supplies had been running short, such goods and services from Moscow. and the list of important repair work had grown long. With the NASA had developed a plan to dodge this problem by trans- prospect of a longer-than-expected hiatus until the next mission, the porting all its future space station crewmembers aboard shuttles. crew squeezed out extra equipment and supplies from the shuttle to McArthur himself was slated for a shuttle return a month after the further restock the station. Soyuz he launches on returns next April (a scheme that would have The planned second mission is officially designated ULF 1.1, given him the American mission duration record). The Russians would which stands for the “utilization and logistics flight” that was belatedly still keep “emergency bailout seats” available to U.S. station astronauts inserted between the scheduled UF-1 and UF-2 missions. Like STS- on a barter basis with occasional Russian rides on space shuttles, but 114, it had a pressurized cargo module installed in the payload bay. would not carry any Americans up or down under ordinary conditions. That module was to carry more supplies and spare parts, along with Those deals, or course, are voided by a substantial new shut- several complex equipment racks for the U.S. Laboratory Module. tle delay. Instead, NASA will need supplemental appropriations to buy The “second wind” that STS-114 provides to the station the space transportation services, and it will need congressional clear- should be able, with continuing supplements from Russian robot sup- ance to evade the legal constraints that forbid such payments. Officials ply ships, to carry the station well into 2006. Sometime in that time have known about this impending crisis for years but had developed frame, the first flight of elaborate schemes to dodge it—schemes that are no longer workable. the European robot Another fatally wounded scheme that had until now merely transport craft (the ATV, been dying would be the 28-mission manifest for the last five years of for “Automated Transfer the shuttle program. Slated for retirement for safety reasons by Vehicle”) should occur— 2010, the shuttle fleet is also supposed to complete station assem- and just in time. bly—at least to the point that expendable rockets and foreign space As with the Russian vehicles can keep the station functioning until a new generation of supply ships, the ATV American space transportation tools come on-line. can carry only equip- With the clock ticking through months and months of no ment that can be shuttle missions, and the adamantine drop-dead date of 2010 loom- passed through the 30” ing guillotine-like on the horizon, we will most likely see more and more tunnel from the docking of the major elements of the station shift to expendable rockets. The port on the end of the Russians are developing a space-to-space tug called “Parom,” assem- Service Module. bled from off-the-shelf spacecraft components that will be able to dock Currently, the cargo on to station-bound payloads in parking orbits and haul them up to the the first ATV (code- station, but for a fee. It may be a bargain. named Jules Verne) is Parom is a Soyuz-sized ”flying tunnel,” with docking mecha- focused on enhancing nisms and rendezvous sensors at both ends. Based at the space sta- the scientific capability of tion, it would await the launching of large components or cargo canis- the station. But if the ters into low, parking orbits. Parom would also arrange to dock with shuttle launch delay Progress tankers, or with propellant supplies launched inside some of extends into 2006, the the cargo modules, to top off its own tanks as needed.